Resolved Year old HDD failing, options or anything I missed?

[Rhei]

Hello folks. So I have a early-2011 (purchased in June/July, just before Lion release) MBP, and today when I did the classic, shut-down and forgot to do something so turn it back on move, it took eons to start up and even longer to do simple tasks like open mail or firefox. I hoped a simple restart would fix the issue to no avail.

Finally did some research about going into the recovery hard disk to repair the hard drive and even going into single user mode and doing fsck, none of which worked. However, this did solve the issue of the OS taking forever to do tasks once it starts up (which still takes quite awhile).

Now my issue is, I can't even seem to format the HDD to be able to reinstall lion. I've attempted to erase the volume (I've also got a separate bootcamp partition), which then tells me I should run First Aid. Going straight to the option of reinstalling Lion, it doesn't even show the main volume in the list of available drives. Only the recovery partition and the windows one.

I guess it's fairly obvious I need to be shopping around for a new HDD, and lesson learned about Apple Care. The two-part question I pose to the public here is, are there any other steps I could take that I missed? It's slightly irritating that a laptop only barely over a year old can already have a failing hard drive. If I didn't miss anything, then what are people's opinions of those hybrid hard drives? I like the speed of it, but I also need space. I'll be browsing other topics about these drives, but while I have a soapbox here might as well ask.

Thanks for answers and opinions!

 

[miles01110]

For something like a hard drive Applecare doesn't make much sense - Applecare costs $200+ while a new hard drive can be had for $100.

Anyways, I don't see the point of hybrid drives. All the caveats of a normal platter-based drive with a moderate speed increase for certain things.

 

[RabidMacFan]

Hard drives fail. It's a fact of technology. Before you try anything else, make sure to make a copy of all of your important data.

If the hard drive is bad, you definitely want it replaced. Any repair utility that gets it back up to speed will give you just enough of a sense of security to put data back onto it, until... it breaks again. So do yourself a favor and go to the Apple store and have them take a look at it so it can be replaced.

If you really are determined to get this faulty hard drive back up and running, you can try using SpinRite. To use it, you'll need to buy a copy, save it to a bootable flash drive, pull the hard drive out and put it into a PC, then boot off the flash drive to SpinRite.

Good luck!

 

[Rhei]

Thanks for the replies. It just bums me out that I didn't get apple care in the first place now and just over a year has passed before something happened where it would come in handy.

I'll take it into the Apple Store once I hit stateside and let them take a look at it, but it's probably just going to be a new hard drive. Again, thanks for the thoughts.

 

[theSeb]

Thanks for the replies. It just bums me out that I didn't get apple care in the first place now and just over a year has passed before something happened where it would come in handy.

I'll take it into the Apple Store once I hit stateside and let them take a look at it, but it's probably just going to be a new hard drive. Again, thanks for the thoughts.

Just replace the hard drive yourself. It couldn't be simpler. Apple and tons of other sites have instructions on how to do it. You don't need to take it to Apple and pay exorbitant prices.